I tell you it’s been kinda liberating. I could have easily followed this slippery slope and completely given up on this thing, but, i don’t know, there’s this compulsion i have to it. And it’s really only for me. But now we’re settled, we have internet, school is on a mid-semester break, so i’ll continue.

That documentary has really sent me back to them. I’ve watched it twice now, which i’m sure is no record. I’ll watch it again before the trend around it drops, and many times after that as time rolls on. I’ve listened to their music more, especially If You’re Feeling Sinister, which i’ve never considered their best but now i’ve been told it is it might have grown on me that requisite bit extra. But if they wanted albums without singles, or didn’t want to release singles from albums, then they shouldn’t have made such obviously standout tracks on their albums. And then released promotion videos for them. And had them as the first Belle and Sebastian song many people would hear, making them special and elevating them forever above all others. The songs, i mean.

I start back again at university today. One day i’ll make it somewhere good and figure everything of this mess of a life out, but until then i’ll have to suffer another year looking like the most should-be-through-with-this-by-now person on campus. Everyone’s so darn young, attractive and with it, no doubt with newer, cooler formative indie touchstones than Belle and Sebastian. This is history. A relic. Everything it made me and everything it shone on and made me feel i could be is a relic with it. Ugh why do you have to go out into this world to get anywhere in it?

Pitchfork Media did one of their rare decent things a few days ago. I guess with casting their nets as wide as they do and having the manpower they have something is bound to stick eventually. What stuck is an hour long retrospective documentary on If You’re Feeling Sinister. Nicely done interviews with everyone in the band at that time just looking back at that time and these songs, that’s all. It doesn’t tell anything you might not already know, but the documentary works walking a line of nostalgia irremediable from this album, this time and the band who made and lived through it, completely indebted to and aided by the mountains of super 8 footage and photographs Stuart and others shot at the time.

Of course Pitchfork can’t help themselves in presenting it to us. i.e.:

“It might seem like artists deliberately cultivating “mysterious” personas is a recent, internet-fueled phenomenon. But while watching this documentary, it’s easy to see that the Scottish band was ahead of the curve. In those days, the band members themselves rarely appeared in press photos or gave interviews. Their album covers featured artful images of bookish outsiders and looked like stills from imaginary movies; their aesthetic was immaculately curated in a way that feels decidedly proto-Tumblr. All of this added up to the band’s strange allure.”

How much does this sound like the band Big Star? And if Teenage Fanclub do sound as closely as everyone says they do, why would i even need Big Star in my life? Except to fall for the perpetuation of rock myths and legitimacies, and to be like all the other dull people when faced with a Teenage Fanclub song and race to be the first to say “Big Star want their sound back.” It is as though something depends on it, like knowing and glibly exclaiming it is a blow for a true, proper rock history, and fixing anything that fits into that history to an image, personage, period and purpose. Nuts to that. Teenage Fanclub are enough, and i’m against anything that takes from that and denies them.

Songs firmly linked to certain memories, and this song seems it will forever remind me of driving along the back side of Richmond RAAF base after leaving a particularly bad party, and it coming on the radio. It was dedicated to people driving – me! – with instructions to play loud. After the boredom and rejection i was then running away from, to have this song and the opening arms that carried it (Sydney’s hip young people’s radio station nonetheless), playing just for me, well… i drove very fast indeed.